An independent streak

As a self-confessed libertarian, it did not take Pieter Cleppe long to realise that public service, and in particular politics, was not his vocation. “The priorities in politics are all wrong,” he says. “Politicians have to make lots of compromises and are always thinking about how to get re-elected. It’s a very constraining environment, and quite at odds with how politics is perceived by people on the outside.”

After training as a lawyer, Cleppe got his first job in 2005, after completing his studies at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and spending a year studying law and economics in Hamburg, Bologna and Vienna. In October of that year, he entered public service as a speechwriter and adviser to Vincent Van Quickenborne, then Belgium’s state secretary for administrative simplification in the government of Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt.

Cleppe enjoyed the five months he spent working for Van Quickenborne. But there was a catch, he says: “I discovered, not to my surprise, that as a politician or an official you don’t really have much power; you just implement what the consensus in society is.”

“Most of your energy is spent on side issues such as selling what has already been decided, or on internal fights. If you are interested in politics and work in government you are easily disappointed because you work on such narrow issues,” he says.

However, even as he laboured as a speechwriter, an escape hatch was opening up. Marc De Vos, a professor of politics whom Cleppe had met as president of the Flemish liberal students’ association, was setting up a think-tank, Itinera. Cleppe became one of its co-founders, and he stayed as an analyst for just over a year, from 2006-07.

“You have a lot of freedom to pursue what you really believe in, and you can try to push things in a particular direction,” he says about working in a think-tank.

He left Itinera because he wanted to practise law. After a year working as an employment lawyer in Antwerp, he found that this was not really his calling, either.

Constructive criticism

In 2008, Cleppe joined Open Europe, a London-based think-tank, to manage its Brussels office. Open Europe shares certain features with Itinera, of which Cleppe lists three: independence, which means not taking any funding from governments or the European Union and instead relying on individual donations, primarily from business people; an attitude towards the EU founded on “healthy, constructive criticism”; and the determination not to get trapped in consensus views of critical issues. Of other Brussels think-tanks, he says: “If they were to refuse EU funding they would be a great deal more credible.”

Cleppe says that a belief in free markets and free trade is the core value of Open Europe, which has just been named the international affairs think-tank of the year by Prospect magazine. “Open Europe’s views go in a direction that I agree with, except that I’d sometimes go much further. I’m not afraid of taking strong positions.”

Open Europe’s positions on the EU have been controversial, and many critics dismiss the organisation as a pressure group pushing an aggressively ideological agenda rather than doing serious research on EU affairs. Cleppe rejects both accusations. The label “anti-European” is used to avoid open debate about important policies, he says. And, he insists, campaigning and research are taken equally seriously at Open Europe.

Open Europe, Cleppe insists, is not a British think-tank, even though most of its operations are based in London. “We are quite international and pan-European,” he says and points out that Open Europe is headed by a Swede and is about to open an affiliate in Germany. “At the end of the day, the real political decisions [on the EU] are made in Germany, because Germany decides on the euro,” he says.

It is part of his job to make sure that Open Europe is not perceived as a think-tank pushing a classic British Eurosceptic line. “Over the years we have managed to get more exposure outside the UK,” he says, although he concedes that Open Europe is more influential in the UK than anywhere else. But, he says, there has been a Europe-wide shift to a more critical attitude toward the EU.